The history of Jordan

The land east of the Jordan River has been inhabited for hundreds of thousands of years and saw some of the world's first farming villages. In antiquity it was home to the kingdoms of Ammon, Moab and Edom and later to the Nabataeans of Petra, before passing under Roman, Byzantine and, from the seventh century, Islamic rule. Under the Ottomans it was a thinly governed frontier of tribes and pilgrim routes. The modern state was created after the First World War as the British-backed Emirate of Transjordan under the Hashemite family, became independent in 1946, and has since been shaped by its wars and peace with Israel, by successive waves of refugees, and by the long reigns of King Hussein and King Abdullah II.

Stone tools show that early humans were present in the Jordan Valley and the eastern deserts at least 200,000 years ago, when the climate was wetter and lakes and marshes attracted game. At the end of the last Ice Age the Natufian hunter-gatherers lived in semi-permanent camps; at Shubayqa in the north-eastern desert they baked a kind of flatbread about 14,500 years ago, the oldest evidence of bread-making yet found.

The region took part in the Neolithic Revolution that turned foragers into farmers. 'Ain Ghazal, on the eastern edge of modern Amman, grew into one of the largest villages of the Near East, with perhaps a few thousand inhabitants, and around 7250 BCE its people buried dozens of plaster statues of men and women with staring painted eyes, some of the earliest large representations of the human figure. In the Chalcolithic age, from about 4500 BCE, villages such as Tuleilat Ghassul near the Dead Sea painted their houses with elaborate murals, and copper began to be mined at Wadi Feynan, which became a centre of metalworking for thousands of years.

Walled towns appeared in the Early Bronze Age, after about 3600 BCE, among them Bab adh-Dhra by the Dead Sea, with its vast cemeteries. In the Late Bronze Age the pharaohs of the New Kingdom of Egypt dominated the southern Levant, but after the upheavals of the Late Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BCE new peoples speaking Canaanite languages formed small kingdoms east of the river: Ammon around the Amman plateau, with its capital at Rabbat Ammon, Moab in the highlands east of the Dead Sea, and Edom in the south around Wadi Araba. Archaeologists debate how far these were true states rather than tribal kingdoms. The northern hill country of Gilead was settled by Israelites, and the three kingdoms fought repeatedly with Israel and Judah west of the river, as recorded both in the Hebrew Bible and in the Mesha Stele, on which a Moabite king of about 840 BCE boasted of throwing off Israelite rule. The Jordan Valley also has a place in religious tradition: Mount Nebo is where Moses is said to have viewed the Promised Land, and the site of Bethany beyond the Jordan is venerated as the place where John baptised Jesus.

From the late eighth century BCE the kingdoms became vassals of Assyria. After Assyria's fall they passed to Babylonia, and although they joined Nebuchadnezzar II against Judah when he took Jerusalem, they later rebelled and were reduced to provinces. The Achaemenid Empire founded by Cyrus the Great absorbed the region in 539 BCE, and over the following centuries Ammon, Moab and Edom lost their separate identities.

Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire in the 330s BCE, and after his death the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt and the Seleucid Empire of Syria fought for the land, bringing the Greek culture of the Hellenistic period. Amman was refounded as Philadelphia, and Greek cities grew at Gerasa (Jerash), Gadara (Umm Qais) and Pella.

In the south an Arab people, the Nabataeans, grew rich by controlling the caravan trade in incense, spices and other luxury goods between Arabia and the Mediterranean. Their kingdom, independent by the second century BCE, reached at its height from the Hejaz to Damascus, which they briefly held. Their capital Petra, set in a hidden valley of red sandstone, was supplied by ingenious systems of dams and channels, and its tombs and temples carved into the cliffs, such as the Khazneh, probably the tomb of King Aretas IV, date mostly from the first century BCE and first century CE.

Rome's general Pompey brought much of the Levant under Roman control in 63 BCE, and the Greek cities of northern Jordan joined the league of the Decapolis. In 106 CE the emperor Trajan annexed the Nabataean kingdom as the province of Arabia, and built a road, the Via Nova Traiana, from Bostra to the Red Sea at Aqaba. The Roman Empire brought centuries of prosperity: Jerash, with its colonnaded streets, theatres and temples, is one of the best-preserved Roman provincial cities, and Hadrian visited it in 129–130. As sea routes replaced the caravans, Petra declined, and an earthquake in 363 damaged it badly.

Under the Byzantine Empire Christianity became the dominant faith. Bishops sat at Petra, Philadelphia and Madaba, and towns built many churches with fine floor mosaics; the sixth-century Madaba map is the oldest surviving map of the Holy Land, and Umm ar-Rasas has more than a dozen churches. The Arab Christian Ghassanids guarded the desert frontier for Byzantium against the Sasanian Empire of Persia, which briefly occupied the region in the early seventh century.

After the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the armies of the Rashidun Caliphate advanced north from Arabia. An earlier Muslim raid had been turned back at Mu'tah, near Kerak, in 629, but in 636 the Arabs crushed the Byzantines at the Yarmuk River on Jordan's northern border, and the whole Levant came under Muslim rule. The region lay close to the heart of the Umayyad Caliphate, ruled from Damascus, and Umayyad princes built palaces and bathhouses in the desert, such as Qusayr Amra, with its painted walls, and the unfinished palace at Mshatta. The Abbasid family planned its revolution from the village of Humayma in southern Jordan, and after a devastating earthquake in 749 and the fall of the Umayyads in 750, the Abbasid Caliphate moved the centre of power to Baghdad. Transjordan became a provincial backwater, though Islam and the Arabic language gradually became those of most of its people, while a Christian minority endured.

After a period of Fatimid and Seljuk rule, the Crusades brought the area into the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Crusader lordship of Oultrejordain built great castles at Shobak (Montreal) in 1115 and Kerak in the 1140s to control the routes between Egypt, Syria and Arabia. Kerak's lord Reynald of Châtillon raided Muslim caravans and pilgrims, and after Saladin destroyed the Crusader army at Hattin in 1187 he executed Reynald with his own hand; Kerak fell in 1188 and Shobak in 1189. Saladin's Ayyubid successors built the castle of Ajloun to watch the Jordan Valley.

The Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt took over in the 1260s, after defeating the armies of the Mongol Empire at Ain Jalut in Palestine in 1260. The Mamluks used Kerak as a royal fortress and the region as a link on the pilgrimage road from Damascus to Mecca, with towns, mills and sugar works in the Jordan Valley, though plague and nomadic raids took a heavy toll in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The Ottoman Empire conquered the Mamluk lands in 1516 and held Transjordan for four centuries, mainly as part of the province of Damascus. Its main interest was the security of the annual Hajj caravan, protected by forts along the pilgrim road. Beyond that, Ottoman authority was often limited to tax collection, and power lay with Bedouin tribes such as the Bani Sakhr, the Adwan and the Howeitat and with leading families of towns such as Kerak and Salt. Many villages were abandoned. In the early nineteenth century forces of the First Saudi State briefly held the south, and in the 1830s the region came under the Egyptian occupation of Ibrahim Pasha, whose troops destroyed Kerak and Salt during a revolt in 1834.

After the Ottomans returned in 1841, the Tanzimat reforms extended their administration east of the Jordan, settling and taxing the countryside. From the late 1860s Circassian and later Chechen Muslims, refugees from Russian conquest of the Caucasus, were settled around the ruins of Amman, which revived as a town. The Hejaz Railway, completed to Medina in 1908, ran the length of the country. Heavier taxation and conscription provoked revolts at Shobak in 1905 and Kerak in 1910, which were harshly suppressed.

During World War I, Sharif Hussein of Mecca, head of the Hashemite family that claimed descent from the Prophet, launched the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in June 1916, encouraged by British promises of support for Arab independence. His son Faisal's forces, advised by the British officer T. E. Lawrence, took Aqaba in July 1917, and Faisal entered Damascus in 1918 and was proclaimed king of Syria in 1920. But Britain and France had secretly agreed in the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916 to divide the region, and the British Empire had also promised a Jewish national home in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. In July 1920 the French drove Faisal from Damascus.

Faisal's brother Abdullah arrived in Ma'an in November 1920 with a small force, apparently intending to march on Syria. In 1921 the British instead accepted him as ruler east of the Jordan, and on 11 April 1921 the Emirate of Transjordan was established under the British Mandate for Palestine, but excluded from the provisions on Jewish settlement. Amman became the capital. Abdullah relied on British subsidies, advisers and the Royal Air Force, and the Arab Legion, led from 1939 by John Bagot Glubb, became the best-trained Arab army of the region. It helped him overcome local revolts and raids by the Ikhwan of central Arabia, and the borders with Saudi Arabia, including the port of Aqaba, were settled in his favour.

The Treaty of London recognised Transjordan's independence, and on 25 May 1946 Abdullah was proclaimed king of the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, later renamed Jordan. When the British Mandate in Palestine ended and the State of Israel was declared in May 1948, Jordan entered the war with other Arab states. The Arab Legion held the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem, and in 1950 Jordan annexed them, a move recognised by few other states; many Arab governments criticised it. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who had fled or been expelled from their homes in what became Israel, an event Palestinians call the Nakba, settled in Jordan and the West Bank and were given Jordanian citizenship, transforming the country's population. On 20 July 1951 Abdullah was shot dead at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem by a Palestinian gunman. His son Talal introduced a new constitution in 1952 but was soon removed because of mental illness, and his grandson Hussein became king while still a teenager.

Hussein's reign of nearly half a century began amid the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt. In 1956 he dismissed Glubb, and in 1957, with American backing, he dismissed a nationalist government and put down what he described as a coup attempt by army officers. His Hashemite cousins in Iraq were overthrown in 1958, ending a short-lived federation between the two kingdoms. In June 1967 Jordan joined Egypt and Syria in the Six-Day War and lost the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Israel, and a new wave of refugees crossed the river.

After 1967 Palestinian guerrilla groups of the Palestine Liberation Organisation built up armed bases in Jordan. At Karameh in March 1968 they and the Jordanian army fought off an Israeli raid, a battle that greatly raised the guerrillas' prestige. By 1970 their armed presence challenged the authority of the state, and after hijackings and an attempt on the king's life, the army attacked them in September 1970. The fighting, known as Black September, killed thousands and ended in 1971 with the expulsion of the guerrillas to Lebanon. In 1974 the Arab League recognised the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians, and in 1988 Hussein renounced Jordan's legal and administrative ties to the West Bank, leaving the claim to the PLO.

Falling living standards caused riots in 1989, and Hussein responded by restoring parliamentary elections and legalising political parties. Jordan refused to join the coalition against Iraq in the Gulf War of 1990 and 1991, which cost it Western and Gulf aid, while some 300,000 Jordanians and Palestinians expelled from Kuwait arrived. After the Madrid conference of 1991 and the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO, Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel on 26 October 1994, the second Arab state to do so after Egypt, and it was given a special role at the Muslim holy sites of Jerusalem. Hussein died of cancer in February 1999.

Abdullah II, Hussein's eldest son, succeeded him in 1999 and pursued economic liberalisation and close ties with the United States, while Jordan received large numbers of Iraqis fleeing the war of 2003. In November 2005 suicide bombers of al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, attacked three hotels in Amman, killing about 60 people. Protests during the Arab Spring of 2011 led to new prime ministers and constitutional amendments, but the monarchy kept wide powers. The civil war in Syria brought more than a million refugees, adding to some two million registered Palestinian refugees and straining the water and public services of one of the world's most water-scarce countries. Jordan joined the coalition against the Islamic State group, which in early 2015 burned to death a captured Jordanian pilot, Muath al-Kasasbeh.

In April 2021 the king's half-brother Prince Hamzah, a former crown prince, was accused of plotting to destabilise the kingdom and placed under restrictions; he renounced his title in 2022. Electoral reforms produced a parliament in which, for the first time, a block of seats was elected from national party lists. In the election of September 2024, held during the war in Gaza, the Islamist Islamic Action Front won 31 of 138 seats, its best result since 1989, a success widely linked to its stance on the Palestinian cause. In April 2025 the government banned the Muslim Brotherhood, the movement behind the party, after announcing that it had uncovered a sabotage plot linked to some of its members. Jordan, with a population of about 11.5 million, remains a close Western ally and a mediator in regional crises, and it continues to depend heavily on foreign aid.